


What Need We Fear Who Knows It

by Daisiestdaisy (Doyle)



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Denial, Grief, Guilt, Hallucinations, M/M, Somewhat Unreliable Narrator, post 3.14
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-05
Updated: 2017-02-05
Packaged: 2018-09-22 02:35:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9578678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doyle/pseuds/Daisiestdaisy
Summary: “Goodbye, my friend,” he said. And that, really and truly, should have been the end of it.Struggling to find closure, Ed returns to the docks. And again. And again.





	

It was important to have closure, some definitive moment marking a great loss, so one could take a moment to feel that grief, accept it, and then move past it. Ed knew because he’d tried this twice before. For Kristen, a quiet picnic in the woods by the resting place he’d chosen for her; for Isabella, a bouquet of her favorite flowers laid by the train tracks. It was an odd little coincidence, now he came to think on it, that in a way Oswald had interrupted both of those memorials.

Well, no danger of that with this one.

Ed exhaled, his breath misting in the icy air as he looked out over the churning grey waters.

“I don’t believe that a person goes on existing after their body dies,” he said, acknowledging to himself the contradiction in even saying it aloud, as if he was addressing some part of Oswald left behind in this place. “But I know that you did. And I hope that you were right, Oswald, and that you’re at peace and reunited with your parents now.” He added, in the vanishingly unlikely event that there was someone to hear him, “In which case, maybe you could pass on my apologies to your father. Much of the last few weeks has been... necessary, but regrettable. In all honesty, I’m relieved that it’s over.”

He’d thought hard about an appropriate totem of their friendship, something to leave here to mark the place. Flowers were traditional at the site of tragedies and accidents, and he’d always liked the symbolism of that. Beautiful but ephemeral things, already dying, with a whole other level of meaning in the significance people assigned to certain kinds of blossom. With the appropriate choices, the bereaved person could communicate all the complexities of a relationship at a single glance. After Isabella had died, he’d chosen...

He frowned, surprised to find that he couldn’t remember. It’d come back to him later. It had been a difficult few days.  

Regardless, laying flowers here might have attracted unwanted attention. He didn’t need some dock worker or bored security guard looking too closely at this spot, even if it would take a trained eye like his to see the blood traces still left behind after two days of hard rain. In the last few hours it had died away to a miserable drizzle, and now a freezing fog was rolling in from the water. Ed looked down at the almost invisible stains on the grey stone of the wharf, and shivered in the cold.

He’d kept his hands in his pockets, partly from the harbor chill but mostly because his right was curled loosely around the thing he’d brought to leave behind. It had necessitated a trip to City Hall, Ed slipping in and out without getting caught up in the chaos of a sinking ship whose captain was nowhere to be found, and bringing with him an old campaign flyer. Oswald was pictured on the front, a close-up in profile, looking determined and strong, the leader Gotham deserved.

“I remember that day,” Ed told him now. Or, told himself. “I thought you were going to strangle that photographer. You wouldn’t say so in as many words, but you were insecure about how the pictures turned out – needlessly so, I should add – and you didn’t see the point campaigning when you were going to buy the election anyway. I hated that it had never even crossed your mind that you could win in a fair fight. And after, you couldn’t believe it when the results came in. I don’t think I’d ever been prouder of anything than when I gave you that moment.”

He drew out his hand and checked that the campaign flyer, folded carefully into the shape of a penguin, hadn’t suffered too much damage on the journey here. He’d taught himself the trick of it in Arkham, in one of the interminable weeks in that place between the bright spots of Oswald’s visits, and it had made his friend’s eyes light up in surprise.

“Call me a sentimentalist,” he tried to joke, but it fell flat, too truthful and too sad. He bent to set the little paper sculpture on the stone edge of the wharf. He’d barely let go before the wind snatched it away, pinwheeling against the grim sky for a second, then gone. So. That was it.

Ed stood up and, eyes stinging from the wind, finally allowed himself to just miss Oswald, for everything he’d been, the good parts and the bad.

“Goodbye, my friend,” he said.

And that, really and truly, should have been the end of it.

**

Sometimes, Ed knew, he struggled to let things go.

Take Isabella. He would have loved her all his life, of course, but if her death had really been just an accident then he would have said his goodbyes and moved on. He’d felt almost at that point that day at the train tracks, as if he was turning out the lights and closing the doors before leaving a house he’d lived in for the last time; moving forward, with fond memories.

But then, that old man who’d heard the crash had clued him into what had been done, and after that it had been like having a dentist drill running inside his head every single second, louder and louder until it drowned out everything else, even the gunshot. It had only stopped when he opened his fist and dropped Oswald backwards over the edge. He’d hit the water like an explosion in the sudden silence, horror and shock on his face as he was swallowed up by the river. Then it was done, Isabella avenged and laid to rest, and Ed had stayed there for a long time, hardly aware of the rain or the weight of the gun in his hand, every drop of anger and vengeance wrung out of him.

His last farewell to Oswald should have been an ending, a line drawn beneath the tragic end to their friendship. There was no reason that that white noise of something unfinished should have started up inside his head again, a different timbre but no less persistent, as he walked away from the docks for what he’d intended to be the last time.

That night, the other him was glaring from the bathroom mirror in the apartment where he’d been staying, the first time in a while that he’d shown up. “That idiot at the crime scene should’ve kept his stupid mouth shut,” he snarled, and the idea that any part of him could think something that was such a betrayal of Isabella enraged Ed. He couldn’t have said afterwards, breathless and bleeding, which one of them had smashed the mirror to pieces.

“Maybe I should have said more.” Two days later. He’d slept poorly, and he reached past his glasses to rub the corners of his eyes. “Is that it? I know that this is finished, that it ended the only way it possibly could have, but my subconscious doesn’t seem to agree.

“I think I’m supposed to tell you that you’re forgiven. But I can’t.” He stopped, cursing himself and the tiredness that was making him inarticulate. "No. Sorry. That came out wrong. What I mean to say is: I forgive everything you did to me. Unequivocally. I did before I even pulled the trigger. But, Oswald, I can’t forgive you for what you did to _her_. I wish I could, because you have more than paid for it, but I don’t have the right. No-one does but Isabella.”

He tried to bring her face to mind, but he was cold and exhausted and somewhere in the restless night he must have dreamed of Kristen, because it was her he pictured first. With effort, with concentration, he turned her into Isabella. It was a nonsense of a thought experiment, because if she’d been around to bestow forgiveness then it would mean he hadn’t killed her in the first place, unless they were back in imaginary realms of ghosts and eternal souls - but still, would she have forgiven Oswald? He wanted to think so. She had been sweet, and _good_ , and she’d known what he had meant to Ed.

“She once told me something about all great love stories ending in violence and death.” He imagined an eyeroll and a derisive scoff from Oswald at that, and it forced a painful smile from him. “So it’s a double-edged sword, the fact that you were acting, as you said, out of love. In the moment, it made it harder.” Infinitely so. “But more... meaningful, too. A true sacrifice for love. I think she would have understood.”

He told himself he felt better for having made the visit. But after it, the day dragged. He seemed to have little to fill up his time, now that he didn’t have a war strategy to plan, either for Oswald or against him. Inactivity bothered him, like an itch on the inside of his skin. He thought about committing a crime just for the fun of it, just for something to do, but outwitting the collective brainpower of the GCPD was an intellectual challenge on par with winning a middle-school chess tournament. He went to the museum anyway, half-heartedly pretending he was casing the place, but it failed to hold his interest, and he kept getting the feeling that he was being watched. A few times he turned, expecting that other Ed to be smirking behind him – maybe wearing Kristen’s face, again, just for variety – but there was nobody there.

**

“I don’t agree that you ‘created’ me.” He framed the words in midair with his fingers, numb from the cold. “I know that emotions were high and both of us said things we shouldn’t. But that was mean. I’m my own man, Oswald. _I_ created me.”

He took a breath. “That said, I’m happy to concede that I wouldn’t be standing here without you,” he admitted. “I would be rotting in Arkham. Or still at the GCPD, even, without your intel to bring down Jim Gordon. Still that, how did you put it? _Jittery loser._ ” Imagining it set his teeth on edge, and that reminder of how much he owed to Oswald made him hesitate.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly, after a moment. “I haven’t been sleeping well. You know how it is in a new place.” He’d sleep an hour or two and wake up to confused fragments of dreams. Oswald falling away from him into the water. Isabella in her car, stark in the oncoming lights of the train and screaming and screaming and screaming.

“You could have come to me.” The words rattled out of him, even though he wasn’t angry, he’d let go of all that anger and it was done. “You could have come to me and said ‘I don’t want you to see her any more’. You didn’t have to give any reason if you didn’t want to, if you were afraid I’d react badly or reject you, and I would have been hurt and I would’ve wondered why but I would have broken it off then and there. I would have done anything you asked me to. Anything at all.” He couldn’t see, and he impatiently pulled off his glasses to wipe the lenses. It always seemed to be raining out here. “I thought you knew that,” he said. “You never even gave me a chance.”

Later, he crawled into bed when it was still light out and dozed rather than fully slept, and he dreamed of their first meeting in the GCPD HQ, exactly the same words and the same excited flutter in his chest at talking to the infamous Penguin, except there was a gun in his hand he didn’t remember picking up and he couldn’t stop himself from lifting it to Oswald’s heart and firing.

**

His other self had been AWOL since one of them had smashed the mirror. Ed hadn’t replaced it. So when Oswald first showed up, it was there in the room with him instead. A shadow in the chair by the window. A few hummed bars of a lullaby Ed had learned from him and for him.

He hadn’t been asleep. He’d given up on real sleep. He lay awake in the dark, resting his head on the crook of his elbow, and listened. When the music tailed off he reached out and found his glasses, then the light-switch.

“You’re not real,” he said. Oswald – the thing his brain had made up to torment him, and given Oswald’s face – didn’t reply, just stared at him from the chair, not blinking, apparently not breathing.

“Ghosts aren’t real,” Ed told him. It. The pallor, one he had only seen on human beings in the GCPD morgue, was an interestingly ghoulish touch. So were the eyes, wide black irises he couldn’t distinguish from the pupil. That bothered him. Oswald’s eyes had been bright, engaging. This felt like a mockery.

After a while, he crawled out of bed and pulled on some clothes. By now he could find his way to the docks in his sleep.

**

He brought flowers. It was the normal, expected thing that people did when someone died, and he should have done the normal, expected thing first and been done with all of this.

At least it had given him a few minutes with something to focus on other than the noise rising and falling inside his head. Making the selection in the florist’s shop. Ignoring the shadow-Oswald lurking on the cusp of his peripheral vision.

He crouched to lay the purple bouquet at his feet, on the spot where even he could see no trace left now of the blood that had spilled here. “They’re heliotrope,” he told Oswald. Not the hallucination, the _real_ – no. He caught himself. Oswald was dead, and the Oswald he talked to here was just as much a construct of his imagination as the other one. “It’s... it’s kind of a joke. Or no, I'm sorry, not that, but a memory. It’s the name of that ragtime piece I played you once when you were convalescing at my apartment, _Heliotrope Bouquet_ , and the color made me think of you, and – traditionally they’re supposed to stand for eternal love, which I considered could be seen as inappropriate or in bad taste, but I hope you know that I did love you very much as a friend, and I always...”

He spun on his heel, standing up and turning at the same moment, so fast that he almost lost his footing. Something had touched his shoulder, but there was no-one in sight except the thing that wasn’t Oswald, slouched ten feet away at the base of the loading crane and watching him with dark, bored eyes.

“Say something,” Ed commanded it. His own voice was shockingly loud. “Say something!” He strode towards it, and he was so angry he didn’t even remember that it wasn’t real until it vanished, and his hands closed around empty air.

**

It might have been the same day. Or the next. They were bleeding into one another.

“I’ve figured out why I keep coming back here.” Ed paced from one side of the stone dock to the other as he talked. It helped him think. “My apologies for not seeing it sooner. I haven’t been myself lately. But I realize now that it’s been staring me in the face. You haven’t been found. You haven’t been buried. The city hasn’t mourned its Mayor. Nobody but me knows that you’re dead. And I’ve been keeping tabs on City Hall and the GCPD and I am so sorry to tell you this, but the search for you is lackluster at best. It’s as if nobody cares what happened to you.”

He had to stop in place and just breathe until the sheer fury abated enough for him to keep talking. “It’s wrong,” he said. “You and I, Oswald, we sacrificed _everything_ for love, and that was important, and it mattered. You mattered.” He scratched absently at the back of his hands. “And when they see that, maybe you can finally rest.”

**

“Lucius is sitting in on this,” Bullock announced, dropping into the chair across from Ed while Lucius Fox sat down with more care, “because he’s walked me through this insane cryptic crossword clue of yours three times and each time I’ve lost a little more of the will to go on living, so the two of you can talk it out. Pretend I’m not here, please.”

Ed kept his face neutral – just another concerned citizen, not over-eager to be in a GCPD interrogation room but willing to do his duty and assist the police in their enquiries – but he was gratified that he’d correctly guessed that if any of these fools was going to work out his message, it would be Fox.

“That’s fine with me,” he said.

“Oh, good,” Bullock muttered, “so long as it’s fine with you.”

If he wanted them to pretend he wasn’t there then he should take a cue from not-Oswald, silent in the corner with its arms folded across its chest. It had been back since Ed had woken up – could you call it waking, if you were standing upright in the middle of an ornate living room with an irate housekeeper screaming at you in Russian and two policemen holding guns on you? Call it a coming back to himself. Not part of his plan, but he was adapting and adjusting to it.

Fox pushed a copy of the police directory across the table to him; for show, Ed supposed, since it was inside an evidence bag, and his hands were cuffed to the table. That part, he felt, was a little heavy-handed, since he hadn’t yet been charged with anything, and the worst they could have on him was destruction of property.

“So we’ve got boats out dredging the bay,” Fox said. “And officers calling morgues in this county and two others along the river looking for John Does with gunshot wounds. That was your message, right?”

“I don’t know anything about a message,” Ed told him, and although he was an excellent liar it was hard to keep the tidal wave of relief he felt from showing on his face.

Fox pointed to the evidence bag, a vivid line of green numbers visible on the book’s cover beneath the plastic. “Left on the captain’s desk,” he said. Bullock grunted, as if even this was a level of involvement he hadn’t invited and didn’t want. “Four-seventeen-sixty-one, the date of the invasion of the Bay of Pigs. All of the police officers’ names blanked out except for the Captain’s; so just the bay,” he shot an unnecessary look of apology to Bullock, “no pigs. And no civilian names defaced except for Dr Thompkins. Lee and Harvey, and the Bay of Pigs was JFK. Who was assassinated, shot, by Lee Harvey _Oswald_. You’re saying someone shot the Mayor at the bay.”

“Smart money’s on you,” Bullock said. As requested, Ed ignored him.

Fox droned on about how only an insider would have known that Leslie Thompkins went by Lee, and about the green pigment on the front of the directory being an exact match for the one used to deface the painting in the Mayor’s mansion with a question mark - something else they couldn’t prove he’d done. He should have included a dictionary definition of _circumstantial evidence_ when he broke in to drop off the directory.

“Gentlemen, I’m sorry but there must be some kind of mistake. I don’t know anything about secret messages in vandalized department directories, and as for the Mayor...” He pulled some real worry and hurt into his performance. “It’s true that I haven’t seen him for some time. Over a week, maybe two, since I turned in my resignation due to unfortunate personal circumstances...”

“People at City Hall said something happened with your girlfriend,” Bullock cut in, and Ed had to grit his teeth and take it. “You and Cobblepot fight over a woman, was that it?”

The edge of the cuffs bit into his wrist as his hands involuntarily clenched, and the pain was as startling as the sudden look of amusement on Oswald’s blank face, or the furious thought that had coursed through him: _shut up, don’t say it with that tone in your voice, it isn’t what you’re implying. He loved me, not her. Only me._

Fox cleared his throat. “I can get you some water.”

“I’m fine,” Ed muttered, and he thought about invoking his right to an attorney but couldn’t make himself say the words. He was tired, and it was so loud in here.

It was loud in the holding cell, too, although they took him to one of the single-occupancy ones at the back of the precinct. Oswald was waiting for him, and he felt glad of the company, even if that company was reproachful and silent.

“Maybe the boats trawling the docks have found something,” Ed told him, when enough hours had passed that it had turned dark outside. Him, not it, because he looked almost human since that half-smile in the interrogation room, and because this dream or ghost or whatever he was was all Ed had left now. “If they do send me back to Arkham,” and the prospect, for some reason, didn’t horrify him as it once would have, “will you come with me?” No response. “Say something,” he sighed, without hope.

And then the door was rattling back, Jim Gordon framed in the doorway. “Nygma. You can go,” he snapped, and Ed thought first, _charming as ever_ , and then that he had misheard that, or imagined it.

“Do you want me in the interview room again, or...”

Gordon looked like he could kill him with a song in his heart, but he’d looked that way before and never followed through yet. “Nope. Oswald says you’re not the one who shot him, and he doesn’t want to press charges for the painting, so we’re cutting you loose.”

That was... it was nonsense, it didn’t make any sense at all, and Ed turned around to Oswald to demand _You talked to_ him _when you won’t even talk to me?_ but the cell was empty.

“Oswald?” he said.

“Washed up in Bludhaven shot in the gut and half dead from hypothermia,” Gordon said, mistaking that for a question to him. “The cold saved him, stopped him from bleeding out. Funny how he’s been awake almost a week and hasn’t called anyone, let anyone know he’s okay, till I tracked him down this morning to take his statement.”

The tone was sarcastic, but it _was_ funny. Hysterical, really. Ed had to press his knuckles hard to his teeth to stop himself laughing. The effort made him shake.

Gordon was saying, “Let’s just say you _did_ try to kill Oswald even though he, quote, swears on his father’s grave that you had nothing to do with it. I’d run, Ed. If I was you, I’d start running. Or if you want to tell me what really happened, maybe we can talk protective custody.”

There was a copper taste of blood in his mouth, and he swiped his thumb curiously across his lip, blinking when it came away red. “Not necessary,” he said. “I should go to Oswald. If someone hurt him, he’s going to need me.” And they were going to have a lot to talk about. They’d had some good conversations lately, hashed out a lot of things, but he’d have to remind himself that Oswald hadn’t actually been present for them. He might not have reached the closure yet that Ed had. “But thank you for the offer, Jim,” he added, suddenly filled with a genuine affection for him, and this place. And Oswald, beyond anything else. “Really. I do appreciate it. I like it here. It’s so quiet.”


End file.
